Autumn

Every year I am drawn out by the fragile beauty of autumn, the decay of leaves from living green to the exquisite death of red, yellow, and brown.  I am very cautious though to avoid being equally drawn into the cliches that abound in capturing this season.  Last year I spent 3 months studying how the early morning light shifted as Autumn waned into Winter, this year I am not going to spend quite as much time.

In my last post I considered the question of how emotion can be reflected in photography in the same way that the abstract expressionism movement of the 50's and 60's in the USA tried to express themselves through painting.  The following photographs are an initial attempt at investigating that question.  To begin with I posed myself the question of what is Autumn and how do I feel it.  How does this season affect me emotionally.  The answer is quite a lot, September/October are my most content months of the year, bringing a sense of well being and comfort as the temperature drops and the leaves change colour.  I think this has to do with it being the season of beginnings for me, throughout my earlier life Autumn brought new starts, schools (I had 4 different secondary schools), school years, college years, even jobs.  September is a time of excitement, anticipation for new learning.  It is a long time since I really started a new college term, but I am still drawn to doing new stuff.

Added to this is the end of the summer, a season of many joys, but also many discomforts.  I do not like the heat, the 3 long summer months with daily temperatures often above 25 degrees make for a tough time sitting in front of a computer.  The cooler days of Autumn bring relief and the sense of enjoying being warm rather than trying to escape the heat.

The question, though, is how to portray this feeling with my camera, other than through the obvious visual metaphors of beginnings or study.  Well, the leaves are still my visual material, their red and yellows are the colour of warmth and heat.  I also want to explore the art of the abstract expressionists and so want to look at the creation of colour fields using my camera.  I could simply deliberately defocus my lens, but then I would have a photographic equivalent of spilled paint, or worse be accused of soft focus Pictorialism.  It is an inescapable truism that photography is about the capture of detail, a degree of the real needs to be present, even if only just.  To this end I have used a shallow depth of field, but with the retention of enough detail to ground the photograph, but my interest is driven by colour combinations rather than structure.

Does it work?  I don't know, but this does capture my emotional response to the season, the warmth of the colours combines with the ambiguity of shape and form to suggest more to learn, more to discover.  This is safe comfortable photography, an antidote to the chaotic hell of the Oktoberfest.